NEWS: “End of Life” upgrade notification for IE 8, 9, & 10 coming.. and how to disable it

Last month, we published KB3123303 with details of the new "End of Life" upgrade notification for Internet Explorer, which will be shipped as an update next week on January 12th.

The update will apply to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 for users who have not upgraded to Internet Explorer 11 (i.e. IE8, IE9, and IE10 users). The update includes a new “end of support” notification feature when the browser is launched. This will automatically open a new tab with the appropriate Internet Explorer download page for their OS.

Customer environments in which the migration to Internet Explorer 11 is incomplete may disabled the notification feature by deploying a registry key. See KB3123303 for details and this blog article for step-by-step instructions.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are not affected by this update. IE9 is the latest version of Internet Explorer supported by these operating systems. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 are also unaffected (support for Windows 8 ends on January 12th and Windows 8.1 comes with IE11).

The notification tab will not appear on every launch of the browser. After the tab is closed it will be 72 hours before it is shown again and only when launching IE (i.e. not during a browsing session).